Ultimately it was overshadowed by news in the wider world (something about a baby, apparently; I didn’t quite catch it), but the main event in Parliament today was another hot-faced debate about the topic that’s gripping everyone except the general public, the Leveson report.

As there had been when the report was first debated on Thursday, there was a strong turn-out. Imagine if new regulations were being proposed for, say, dentists. Most people, I suspect, value dentists rather more highly than they do journalists, but the House would be near-empty.

The Leveson report, though, is about the press, hence MPs are consumed by it almost as much as the press is. MPs, after all, live through the press – they spend their days briefing, leaking, gossiping, trying to get certain things into the papers, trying to keep certain things out of them.

As a result, the benches thronged with big names: Theresa May, Jack Straw, David Blunkett, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, David Miliband, Yvette Cooper, and even the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, who so impressed commentators last week with his sensational speed-reading: many noted how, just four hours after receiving the 2,000-page report, he was able to tell the House that he endorsed every word of it.

The debate was led by Maria Miller, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. She implored the House to “put the politics to one side”. Well-meaning though her plea was, it sounded like asking Premier League footballers to put the swearing to one side, or indeed the football.

She summed up her speech. “Today is not about what is right,” she said. For a moment I thought she’d finished, but in fact she’d merely lost her place in her script. “Today is not about what is right in the here and now,” she resumed, “it is about a profound set of issues for our democracy that will have real and lasting consequences.”

In this case she may well be correct, although of course politics is a world in which all consequences are deemed “real and lasting”; I will stand up and applaud the first MP I hear admitting that his actions will have consequences that are “negligible and felt only briefly if at all”.

During the debate we heard, many times, the usual solemn lines about how “the status quo” was “not an option”, and how the press couldn’t be allowed to “mark its own homework” (I always thought “marking your own homework” was one of Labour’s policies for schools, but I must have got that wrong).

One man, at least, wasn’t going to let every cliché slip through unexamined. Peter Lilley, a Cabinet minister under Margaret Thatcher and John Major, said that the two most dangerous phrases in politics were “The status quo is not an option” and “Something must be done”. He himself, he explained, had suffered from unkind stories in the press, but this didn’t mean he supported legislation; like John Redwood (also a one-time Major minister), he couldn’t see how legislation would actually prevent abuses.

Jack Straw derided David Cameron for having commissioned the report only to end up “rubbishing” its key recommendations. This has been a favourite theme of those who back the report in full: they believe that if you commission something, you have to express delight at the outcome, whatever that outcome may be.

I wonder if such people take the same attitude when they hire workmen to do up their homes. Picture the scene in the Straw household.

“Oh Jack, darling, look at what these workmen have done to our kitchen. This isn’t what we wanted. It’s awful.”

“Nonsense, dear! We hired them, and therefore we are duty-bound to admire everything they’ve done. Even if the tiles are the wrong colour and the drawers don’t open and they’ve put the taps in upside-down.”

Harriet Harman, who had already made a lengthy statement on Thursday about why self-regulation would no longer do, and said the same thing on TV at the weekend, rose to repeat her views. “The definition of insanity,” she cried, “is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different outcome!”